We leave the theatre. It’s just a few minutes’ walk
to the flat.
I feel disoriented. Everything is yellow and black.
Something is churning inside me,
slowly, like a machine starting up.
The night is cold. The city lights
flicker. The sounds wash over me.
I break out in a sweat. Nausea sets in. My
legs are shaking.
I no longer know where I am.
A searing pain shoots through my stomach.
I sit down on the icy tarmac. I can’t
go any further.
I’d like to ask for help. The words won’t
come.
The intensity is all-encompassing, but it has no visible form.
Between what I feel and what appears,
the distance can be immense.
I learnt very early on to smile on the outside, to
scream on the inside.
Nothing shows on my face; everything shows through
my drawings.
This sentence could make drawing a language
of substitution. As if the paper were saying in my place
what I cannot put into words.
That is not how I draw.
I’m not looking for the shape of a fear or the
colour of a pain. I’m preoccupied with what
is happening on the paper: a density, a
resistance, the proximity of two shapes, a
space to reclaim.
Yet something is changing.
The pressure increases. My hand slows down. A gesture
begins again just when I thought I’d finished it.
A colour gains ground. These variations
appear without me always knowing what
causes them.
The drawing does not convey what I am feeling. It
retains a trace of that change.
I can return to a sheet of paper and observe
this change without being able to name it.
Something has shifted the gesture, but the mark
does not tell me what.
If the drawing revealed what I am feeling, it would be enough to
decipher it. A shape would correspond to an
emotion, a colour to a state, a pressure to
a cause. But no equivalence of this sort
holds true.
The mark does not reveal. It bears witness to a passing moment.
On my face, this passing moment may leave no
trace. A calm expression may accompany
considerable turmoil. A smile may
remain whilst everything falls apart
inside.
What is visible does not measure intensity.
On the page, I do not have to produce the exact sign
of what I am feeling. I do not even need to
know what I am feeling. The gesture encounters the
material before the experience has found its name.
A mark appears.
It tells no story on my behalf. It does not allow anyone to trace back to what I have experienced.
It merely bears the consequence of an
experience that has reached the gesture.
That evening, the transition can no longer remain discreet.
The body takes up all the space. What was previously unseen
becomes pain, trembling, nausea,
the inability to move forward.
I breathe, deeply. The pain subsides.
We set off again.
The world carries on, and so do I.
In the drawing, nothing needs to reach
that level of violence.
Sometimes, a few millimetres are enough.
A slightly different pressure. A shape
redrawn once more. A gesture interrupted earlier.
I can ignore what caused them and yet
notice that a shift has taken place.
The sheet of paper does not reveal what I felt. It
retains the trace of what my face did not
show.
